On Thursday at 13:34 p.m. Lufthansa returned from the longest flight in the company's history with an Airbus A350-900. With the D-AIXP, the carrier brought scientists from Hamburg to the Flakland Islands. The machine then flew back to Munich Airport.

The long-haul jet and the crew were greeted with a water fountain at the second largest airport. Airport boss Jost Lammers and Stefan Kreuzpaintner, Lufthansa Chief Commercial Officer & Hub Manager Munich, also welcomed the crew on the apron.

Last Sunday, January 31st, the 16-person crew around Captain Rolf Uzat went to the longest flight in the history of Lufthansa started. From Hamburg to the Mount Pleasant military base, she needed a total of 13.700:15 hours for the 26-kilometer route.

Today's flight is also record-breaking, according to Lufthansa: the Airbus A350-900 “Braunschweig” covered the 13.400-kilometer flight in 14:03 hours. In the history of Munich Airport, no aircraft has landed that has covered such a long flight route without a stopover. On board the special flight were 40 passengers from the research vessel “Polarstern” who were in the ACommissioned by the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) in Bremerhaven, flew back home.

Since the hygiene requirements for this flight were extremely high, the outward and return flight went down in Lufthansa history for another reason: two weeks before departure, the Lufthansa crew was quarantined at the same time as the passengers in a Bremerhaven hotel. The entire business trip lasted a total of 20 days for the crew; no crew had recently completed more days of service.